Words were labels that he had never paticularly enjoyed. Words were lazy, letting you lapse into not thinking about them. Once you had the label for it, you could move on, not bother thinking about the object itself.

"Weird" was a label. It was a sentence. It was a write-off. A decision that he wasn't worth worrying about, not worth bothering with. They tried to pretend it wasn't, or at least some of them did - at least the cruel ones were honest. They didn't pretend they wanted to understand him. As far as they were concerned they did; they understood the word, didn't they? There couldn't be much more to it than that.

And there he was. Labelled. Wearing it like a badge, feeling as though it were stamped upon him somewhere. Or tattooed. Attached to him. Something he'd never shake off.

Words were reductive. They were deceptive, telling you all that you thought you needed to know, but in truth they should only be used as a shorthand, a footnote. "when we say weird, please find attached appendices 1-23, detailing and informing what has lead us to this conclusion, the justification. this should assist in understanding."

But for some reason, that never caught on.